28 Air Corps friends and at one point or another Snyder almost invariably will turn to Mrs. Snyder and say, "Honey, you certainly are pretty! ," and she will smile at him affectionately. They have dinner at home, cooked by Mrs. Sny- der, or else go into town to a juke- box place or a Mexican resta uran t, and lnaybe somewhere to dance afterward with SOlne of the pilots and their wives or girls. The Snyders' house is at the post, just beyond the western approach to the air field, and all day and all night they can hear the airplanes in the sky. Mrs Snyder has never been up in an airplane except when she flew to New York with Danny on their honeymoon a year and a half ago; that was on a commercial airplane and Danny tells her that doesn't count. She listens to a great deal of talk about flying but doesn't ever say much about it herself. She just loves Danny and looks after him carefully. When Snyder's work is not going smoothly, he sleeps and eats at random. He may go for three or four days with- out taking more than short naps or sit- ting down to a regular meal. He sleeps at such times on the floor of the opera- tions office, using a parachute bag for a pillow and a winter flying suit for a mat- tress, or he may run home for a couple of hours after midnight and set his alarm clock to go off before dawn. He seems to he equally at ease on and off schedule. Many good pilots feel right and se- cure only when they are flying. On the I' . . ground they are bored and seemingly without resources. They go in for vio- lent entertainment of one kind or an- other, and frequently wind up with nervous breakdowns. Snyder would rather fly than do anything else, but he is calm even when he is not in the air. "I think about flying an awful lot when I'm on the ground," he once remarked. "There are so many possibilities in fly- ing that, if you get the habit, you can think about them all the time and never get to the end of them. Y ou first think about what might happen under a cer- tain set of circumstances, then you think what you might do wrong, and then what you might do right. It's like a game. I do it all the time. I can't help it. But it keeps me busy even when I'm not busy, if you know what I mean." Snyder met his wife at a dance in San Antonio when he was a cadet at Ran- dolph Field. His first words to her, she has since told people, were "Honey, you certainly are pretty!" He took her out as often as he could after that and they agreed to get married as soon as he got his wings. She was nineteen then and living with her family in San Antonio, where her father ran a shoe store. V\Then the Snyders went to New York for their honeymoon, Danny's mother and father, who are in their forties, took them to theatres and night clubs and the four of them had a fine time. Mrs. Snyder says that she'd rather go out with Danny's mother and father than with any of her friends in San ((After you." ((No, no, after you " .'" ./ /Æ A . " Th ' . , " h ntonlO. ey re Just as young. s e says with astonishment. "They dance d h ." an everyt lng. Danny himself feels pretty old at times, he says. He felt old only the other day when he was "checking out" a new pilot in an AT -7. "Checking out" means taking a new pilot for a ride and sizing him up. Snyder took the man up in an AT -7, a two-engine training ship. vVhen they were about to come in for a landing, Danny was han- dling the controls and was just going to turn them over to the new pilot to see how good a landing he could make. A B-24 was flying ahead of them, slightly off to the right, and Danny was watch- ing to be sure the new flier didn't get too close to the wake of the big, four- motored ship. The hurricane of air, called the "prop wash," sent back by such a ship can toss a small plane like an AT -7 around as if it were a piece of paper. The B-24 turned into his path and suddenly the right wing of the AT-7 dipped as if it had been hit by a great weight. There was only one thing to do at a low altitude, under these circum- stances, to avoid spinning in and crash- ing. That was to push the throttle of the right engine as far as it would go, and to push it quickly, so that the added power on that side of the plane would bring the wing up again before the airplane went into a spin. The way Danny and the new pilot were sitting in the double cockpit of the AT-7 that day, Danny's right hand and the new pilot's left